Concluding Volume 5 of the European Journal of Higher Education and introducing a Debate Section

The European Journal of Higher Education (EJHE) is establishing itself as one of the flagship journals in the study of higher education and specifically in European higher education. It aims to offer comprehensive coverage of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of higher education in Europe, analyses of national higher education reforms and processes, and comparative studies of higher education within Europe (i.e. the European Higher Education Area) or elsewhere compared to Europe. Building on the successful legacy of its predecessor, Higher Education in Europe, the Journal has in the past five volumes featured a broad range of higher education topics and social science approaches, both qualitative and quantitative.

This issue comes after a rather eventful year in European higher education. The Ministerial Conference of the European Area for Higher Education (EHEA) took place in Yerevan in May 2015. The Yerevan Ministerial Communique highlights the quality and relevance of learning and teaching, which are now at the centre of the policy agenda, along with fostering the employability of graduates and making higher education systems more inclusive (Klemencic and Ashwin 2015). European Ministers also committed to achieve full implementation of the previously agreed structural reforms, which are: a common degree structure and credit system, common quality assurance standards and guidelines, and cooperation in mobility and joint study programmes and degrees. I am happy to note that the priorities laid out in the Yerevan Communique resemble some of the issues outlined in the Editorial in the European Journal of Higher Education at the beginning of this year (Klemenčič 2015). Back then I wrote that ‘ … the advancement of teaching and learning is certainly relevant, highly complex and challenging, and politically uncontroversial that may well present that large unifying theme, which could rejuvenate the Bologna Process’ (Klemenčič 2015, 2). Similar recommendations, but further developed with specific policy lines and research findings, came also from the Bologna Researchers’ Conference (see Klemenčič and Ashwin 2014). The first meeting of the Bologna Follow Up Group (BFUG) that took place in September 2015 in Luxembourg introduced a new structure of three working groups (and four advisory groups) focusing on reporting, implementation, and new visions for the European Higher Education Area.

The Debate Section

Following a successful practice in some other leading social science journals, the European Journal of Higher Education is introducing a Debate Section and with it a new format of articles: a Debate Section Article. The Debate Section offers a platform for debate on controversial issues in higher education. The Debate Section comprises two or three shorter articles (up to 5000 words in total), which take contrary or complementary standpoints on a common issue. The articles are expected to be based on rigorous social science research. The Debate Section will be published approximately once per year.

This issue launches the first Debate Section on the topic global assessment of learning outcomes, which is a much debated initiative by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The debate on global assessment of learning outcomes comes amidst a broader public discussion revolving around universal higher education, the rising cost of higher education and student debt, and an array of scholarly literature questioning how much students actually learn in higher education, such as ‘Academically Adrift’ (Arum and Roksa 2011), ‘Paying for the Party’ (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013), ‘Excellent Sheep’ (Deresiewicz 2014), ‘Our Underachieving Colleges’ (Bok 2006) or a recent article by Steven Pinker in the New Republic entitled provocatively: ‘The Trouble with Harvard. The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it’ (Pinker 2014).

In March 2015, The Economist argued in favour of comparable measures of universities’ educational performance:

Students would have a better idea of what was thought well where, and employers of how much job candidates had learned. [ … ] Institutions would have an incentive to improve teaching and use technology to cut costs. [ … ] Governments would have a better idea of whether society should be investing more or less in higher education (The Economist, March 28, 2015).

The Economist recognises that authentic measures of student learning are difficult to devise but nevertheless urges governments to support the efforts by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to design ‘a PISA for higher education’. Not everyone agrees (see, for example, Altbach 2015).

The two articles in this Debate Section discuss the rationales, viability, and implications of the idea of global assessment of students’ learning outcomes in higher education. The affirmative article comes from Dirk Van Damme, Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division (IMEP) at the OECD in Paris. The negative article is from Paul Ashwin, Professor of Higher Education and Head of Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University.